December 01, 2009

Why the Israeli Ambassador will be supporting Hapoel Tel Aviv at Celtic Park on December 2

Hapoel Tel Aviv attracts a Labour Zionist support in opposition to Revisionism. Labour Zionism, however, has been as much a violator of Palestinian human and national rights as its Revisionist competitor. Often the competition between the two camps is in terms of degrees of harshness towards Palestinians.

The article in Not the View on ‘Israeli Football: The Politics of Play’ presents Israeli team Hapoel Tel Aviv as a progressive, anti-racist organisation in contrast to Beitar Jerusalem, which notoriously has a large, openly racist fan base that acts in the spirit of its fascist-inspired founders of the Revisionist Zionist movement.

The author, Dr. Dominic Moran, describes some of the extreme racism of Beitar fans, and refers to one disgusting example of the activities of such fans when they don Israel Army uniforms to control, brutalise and humiliate Palestinians at checkpoints. (see picture below)

The article, however, is seriously misleading in its positive depiction of the competing fans of Hapoel Tel Aviv, who, after all, joined with their Beitar rivals by serving in the Israeli Army and executing the Israeli Army’s murderous assaults on Palestinians.

Hapoel Tel Aviv attracts a Labour Zionist support in opposition to Revisionism. Labour Zionism, however, has been as much a violator of Palestinian human and national rights as its Revisionist competitor. Often the competition between the two camps is in terms of degrees of harshness towards Palestinians.

Labour Zionism has been dominant in Israel through all the massive waves of ethnic cleansing beginning in 1948. Labour Zionists planned and carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Dr. Moran points out that Hapoel “were controlled by the Histadrut labor federation” until recently. He might have explained that the Histadrut constituted the core of the Zionist colonising project that produced the Israeli state from the first wave of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The Histadrut founded the Haganah ethnic cleansing militia that morphed into the Israeli Army, whose murderous crimes in Gaza this year have led to the UN Human Rights Council calling for Israeli war criminals to be tried in the International court of Justice. This call follows Judge Goldstone’s meticulous research into Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Hapoel Tel Aviv, Dr. Moran notes, started out as “as a workers' team in direct conflict with the purported bourgeois support base of Maccabi Tel Aviv”. These workers, however, overwhelmingly identified themselves as part of a settler colonial enterprise – Zionism - dedicated to the ethnic cleansing of the natives. This included the expulsion of Arabs from jobs to make way for Jewish immigrants, a vile programme termed by Labour Zionists the “conquest of labour”. Hatred of bourgeois went hand in hand with cooperation with those same bourgeois to drive out Palestinians. Labour Zionists were a classic case of “radish socialists” – “Reds” on the outside but “Whites” underneath.

Readers might be puzzled by Dr. Moran’s remark that “the team's association with the political left has led to its popular association in recent years with the Ashkenazi elite,” but in a colonial-settler state like Israel the term ‘left’ (with a very few honourable exceptions) has come to mean support for a fraction of ethnic cleansers who used “socialist” rhetoric to cover their crimes, as opposed to the harsher, Nazi-style of Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman or current and past Prime Ministers such as Sharon.

This European Jewish Ashkenazi elite, which Labour Zionism represents, still controls the commanding heights of the Israeli military and economy and European Ashkenazi racism towards Oriental and Ethiopian Jews in Israel can be extreme, reminiscent of Alabama or Mississippi in the 60’s, but this pales besides the ongoing mass killings and dispossession of Palestinians.

The “left wing” rhetoric of Hapoel Tel Aviv fans indicates nothing more than intra-Zionist feuding. Look, for example, at the website of self-styled “anti-fascists ultras” of Hapoel Tel Aviv and you will find no reference whatsoever to Israel’s brutal massacres in Gaza in January. A strange silence from supposed “anti-fascists” at a time when British Jewish Labour MP Gerald Kaufmann referred in the British Parliament to the Israeli Army as “Nazi” for its crimes in Gaza! The reason is simple, but needs to be faced: Hapoel “anti-fascists” are actually part of the polled 94% of Israelis who support the brutal three-year siege of Gaza, and the January devastation and murder of 1,400 Palestinian souls.

You might expect “anti-facists” to refuse to serve in an army that admits to having used the same Wehrmacht military manuals that guided the crushing of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto to devastate Jenin Refugee Camp in 2002. If that was too much to expect, perhaps Hapoel’s fans could have condemned Vilnai when this Jewish military man notoriously threatened a “Holocaust “ on the people of Gaza even before the massacres of January.

The visit of Hapoel Tel Aviv to Parkhead on Wednesday 2nd December is an opportunity to show solidarity with the Palestinian people and to challenge the ‘sense of impunity’ Judge Goldstone found among Israeli war criminals. Carry a flag or wear a Palestinian scarf during the game. It will be broadcast live into Israel. You will never get a better megaphone to drown out the criminal complicity of Gordon Brown, or Celtic Chairman John Reid, in Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing.

Mick NapierScottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign

NOTES:1. Dr. Dominic Moran is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. He works from there as a Senior Correspondent for ISN Security Watch, an organisation that comes highly recommended by the Assistant Director of the prestigious US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR Board is a roll call of US investment bankers and political elites, including the notorious Madeleine Albright (500,000 dead Iraqi children is a price worth paying to invade Iraq.)Not the View fanzine should have told their readers this information when they ran an article in the latest issue (178) on “Israeli Football: the Politics of Play”

2. Dr. Moran attempts to apportion blame for Israel’s apartheid equally on the victims and those who benefit from this system of state-enforced racial separation. Dr. Moran writes of the “progressive deterioration in domestic race relations with the rise of hard-line Islamic sentiment in some northern Arab communities and the political rise of Yisrael Beiteinu, which advocates the transfer of several Israeli-Arab communities to a future Palestinian state.”

3. Beitar Jerusalem has by far the largest supporter base among Jewish Israelis.

עבדים של יהודים.. למי שלא הבין - חבר שלנו ליציע בתמונה אופיינית באחד המחסומים. "נשקו את הצעיף אחר כך תעברו".“Slaves for the Jews […] to those who don’t understand, our friend from the stands in a typical picture at one of the roadblocks, ‘Kiss the scarf and then you pass.